Smartphone Home: A Burst of 'Berry

With so much choice, there's never been a better—or more bewildering—time to pick a side in the smartphone wars. Here, we present part two of our quick guide to soothing your phone-fevered brow

Ever since its humble beginnings as a glorified two-way pager, Research In Motion’s BlackBerry has been the mobile of choice for accountants, bankers, and everyone else doing God’s work. For years, the average New York restaurant has been full of droves of suits, double-fisting their personal and work ’berries.

But then, a new wrinkle: With kids these days texting and tweeting more and more, the quintessential keyboard phone started to gain a devoted following of students, slackers, and the rest of us, too, which has RIM eager to take advantage. Suddenly, the BlackBerry is the cool person’s cool business phone. They’ve got a new phone, the Torch, which combines a vertically sliding keyboard with a touchscreen. They’ve got cool young people in commercials, doing young people things! They’ve even got Diplo!

That’s all well and good, but does any of this equal a good phone? Are the latest generation of BlackBerrys really fit for your average Joe Facebook, or do they still have a whiff of the boardroom about them?

**The Good: **It doesn’t take long after getting your hands on a BlackBerry to figure why the people who use it do so religiously. Once you get used to it, the keyboard is immensely comfortable and fast. The e-mail is top-notch, and BlackBerry Messenger is a great service, provided you have enough like-minded BBM friends: Ask for your friends’ PINs, and you enter an exclusive club, where everyone chats away for free with aplomb. BlackBerry has really got this text thing down; compared to its smartphone competition, it’s the master of everything with letters.

**The "Meh": **Keen to fix the little idiosyncracies that might’ve kept more casual users from switching to BlackBerry—like the unpolished look and feel, or the worst web browser in all of history—RIM has debuted a new version of their operating system, OS 6. It’s a huge step forward, and has its highlights—we especially like the new home row, which cycles through groups like "favorites" and "recent," but can be pulled up to reveal a full screen of favorite or recent icons. But on the whole, the upgrade is more about keeping pace with the competition than pulling off anything revolutionary. It feels like for all their talk about making a consumer-friendly device, RIM is largely skimping on that part of the experience and leaning on the overlap between our personal and business spaces. So it doesn’t play video or games very well... but it’s got a keyboard! Sure, the social networking feature is a bit half-baked... but the e-mail is great! With the Androids and iPhones of the world really bringing the eye candy these days, BlackBerry doesn’t yet support Flash, or 3D games. And no matter how much you don’t need the frills, shortcomings like that are disappointing.

**The "Huh?": **Seriously, RIM? Are you really going to tell us a 480 x 360 pil touchscreen (In laymen’s terms, that’s "small"), or an outdated 624 megahertz processor are the centerpieces of your hot new Torch? Really, the problem extends to the entire range of hardware: The build quality is solid, but decidedly un-sexy, and while nothing is horribly wrong about the latest-generation BlackBerrys, something about them feels a bit... Bush-era. While everyone else is rolling out Retina Displays, Super AMOLED screens, gigahertz processors, and all the rest, the feature list on a new BlackBerry reads like a Hong Kong iPhone knockoff. The war for the consumer market is driven by gadget envy, and RIM is walking into battle with damp powder.

**The Cool Factor: **As our online lives have grown all-encompassing, and our communications more and more text-based, the BlackBerry is well-placed to capture this new demographic of tech-savvy youth, constantly all a-twitter. It’s no longer geeky to be thumbing away at your phone all day—in fact, it looks like you have more friends that way. We just wish RIM would add something truly drool-worthy to their offerings: A cutting-edge touchscreen, maybe, or killer apps, or a user experience that’s more than merely acceptable. That combined with the usual BlackBerry hallmarks, will make for a tasty offering. But until then, the BlackBerry, for all its solid features, will be the antithesis of cool—it’ll be business-like.

**Buy one if... **you need no-look e-mailing for the Town Car ride to your bro’s "I made partner!" bash at the strip club. Or if you otherwise don’t care all that much about using your phone to watch video, or play games, or surf the web...

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